#1 – The Average Open Rate for A Welcome Email Is 82%.
The open rate for a welcome email is often a lot higher than that of the emails that follow on afterwards. This means it is vital that the first email you send to your prospects strikes the right tone and creates a great first impression.
A welcoming email needs to capture your brand and show the prospect how you can help them. Most importantly, you need to make this prospect feel welcomed and show that your business is trustworthy to encourage reciprocal engagement/replies.
Without having an effective welcoming email, you risk damaging the reputation of your business and the prospect may feel less inclined to open the future emails that you send.
Another way to look at this statistic is that you’ve focused too heavily on optimising the introductory email, and in the process, neglected your follow-up emails.
Reviewing your email marketing strategy and optimising your emails for different communication stages with your prospects will help to maintain this high engagement and will prevent the open rate from dropping off after the welcome email.
#2 – 42% Of Companies Consider Email to Be One of Their Most Important Lead Generation Channels.
Email is one of the most widely used marketing channels out there and many businesses find it to be their most important and effective lead generation platform.
The reason why so many companies believe email to be their most important lead generation channel is because of its significant ROI and cost-effectiveness.
Email allows businesses to easily engage directly with prospects and other members of their audience and generate interest in their business. It’s easy for businesses to monitor & analyse their open and click-through rates and find what’s working and what’s not within their email strategy.
This allows businesses to fully optimise their emails so they can continuously improve their results and ROI. It’s also a rather cheap method compared to others when getting started, and the generation of leads can be far quicker than a Search Engine PPC campaign, for example.
#3 – Emails That Contain One to Three Questions Are 50% More Likely to Get Replies Than Emails Without Any Questions.
Email marketing is great for getting conversations started between you and your prospects, but after sending an email to your prospects, the ball is in their court, and encouraging them to pick it up and serve a return can be easier said than done.
If you’re wanting to increase the replies your emails get, then you need to remember that email marketing isn’t just a one-way conversation opportunity for you to promote your offering. If you want to generate quality leads, then you must give prospects a reason to respond, and when they do create valuable exchanges with them.
Asking questions pushes a response from your prospects and will help to get conversations going so you can build rapport and nurture potential business opportunities. Replies to your emails can show who is interested and who is not, so you can focus on converting and building rapport with prospects that engage the most with your emails.
#4 – Segmented email campaigns see 14% higher open rates as compared to non-segmented email campaigns.
Achieving and maintaining a high open-rate is often one of the primary goals for any email marketing campaign. The more eyes on your email the better and the better chance you’ll have to convert a prospect into a customer.
One way to improve email open rates is to segment your email campaigns. Sending out the same email to a large group of people who are in different industries and have different problem/pain points can alienate some members of your audience.
Remember that your email may not be relevant to every person on your mailing list, so segmenting your email campaign by looking at the varying types of people and businesses you have on your mailing list is vital for maximising open and click-through rates.
Segmenting allows you to create more personalised and relevant messages to your prospects rather than using a blanket approach with the same generic message.
#5 – Over 20% of Marketers Surveyed Say That Email Design is Improving Their Email Engagement.
An effective way of improving your email engagement is to consider the design of your emails. The design element of your emails is vital and overlooking it could negatively impact your email engagement.
By having an inconsistent and unprofessional design your emails are likely to be disregarded and overlooked due to their low quality. Your design should reflect your brand image, so having a poorly designed and poorly constructed email message, could reflect badly on your brand.
If you unexpectedly change or lower the quality of your email design, your current customers could believe the email has come from an illegitimate source and could see it as spam. This is why maintain your design and the quality level consistent across your entire email marketing strategy is essential for improving and maintaining your email engagement.
Developing an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing design for your email that is consistent with and relevant to your brand image will help to maintain a professional appearance and is likely to result in more engagement from your prospects.
However, it’s important not to overcomplicate your design, as this could distract from the content of your email. Remember that sometimes less is more.
